Who Is Obama's Megalith For?

His presidential center in Chicago is a nice gesture, but it’s too centered on him.

- ARCHITECTURE / JUSTIN DAVIDSON

IS THERE ANYTHING more hopeful or emblematic of change than a garden in its first scraggly youth?

Only a playground, perhaps. Magnificent versions of both grace the new Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. The soil remains exposed for now, and shade is still scarce, but there’s plenty of lushness to come. Entering from the straight-arrow formality of Midway Plaisance Park, I was happy to follow sinuous pathways around copses, arbors, and flowered hillocks. The children’s area made me wish I were small enough to test my agility on all the complicated apparatuses. In the winter, I might have hurled myself down the artificial hill, created to provide a flat neighborhood with topography so Chicago’s youth no longer had to go without sledding, the way Michelle Obama did when she was growing up nearby.

These days, living through a presidency marked by narrowness and resentment, the grace, humor, and curiosity with which Barack Obama approached the world feel impossibly distant. But here, on this wedge of sensitively crafted terrain, carved out of Jackson Park and shaped by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, you can breathe in the scent of openness and possibility. This land turns nobody away.